Blue Pixel

Sunday, January 17th, 2010 by Reed Hoffmann

Last week I had a chance to use the new Nikon D3S. This camera can shoot at over 100,000 ISO (!!!). Just a few years ago I was saying that all I needed was a camera that gave me good quality 1600 and decent 3200. Now we've gone way beyond that.

The first digital camera I began using on a daily basis gave me the choice of 200, 400, 800 or 1600 ISO. The 200 was okay, the 400 was noisy, the 800 was barely usable, and, well, the 1600 was good for a laugh. Or a cry. It was 1996 and the camera was the NC2000e, a $15,000 1.3 megapixel digital SLR that started life as a Nikon N90S, was then bought by Kodak, converted to digital and sold by the Associated Press. Despite the many difficulties of using it, for newspaper photographers the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.

Then at the end of 1999 along came the Nikon D1. 2.7 megapixels, $5000, reasonable ISO up to 800 (and decent at 1600). This was the camera that most newspapers bought to make the conversion to digital. Over the years we’ve seen many improvements through many models of cameras, both Nikon and Canon. And as each new release brought new features, one big one we all looked at was ISO performance. Any photographer will tell you that the higher ISO they can shoot, the easier it is to make good pictures. Raising the ISO means the camera needs less light, which often equates to a faster shutter speed. For sports or news photographers in particular this is important. And the last couple of years we’ve gotten cameras that have given much, much higher quality at those upper ISO’s than ever before.

At the beginning of digital, I said that all I really wanted was a camera that could give me pretty good images at 3200 ISO. The Nikon D3 and D700 made me stop saying that. With those cameras, I started shooting night and indoor sports at 4000 ISO, something I still marvel at. And the images look great. And last week I took the new Nikon D3S to a Big 12 basketball game and shot at 10,000 ISO. Yes 10,000! Not only that, but the quality was as good as I was getting a few years ago at 2000. That night I was telling a friend that I really have no idea where the upper limit on these cameras will end up being. Both the D3S and Canon’s new Mark IV have a top range of over 100,000 ISO, though the noise level there will doubtless be too much for most people. But that’s right now. Where will we be in two years, or even five years? I know one thing – I can’t wait to find out.